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Wednesday, July 6, 2011

I love this piece over at Jezebel. In it, Dodai Stewart comments on an interview with Velvet d'Amour, a plus-sized actress, model and photographer. Some of my favorite quotes by d'Amour that are mentioned in the Jezebel piece are:

Fleshy, curvy women have been relegated to men's magazines, whilst edgyeditorial fashion in particular, has been inundating us with imagery glorifying adolescence (sometimes using models even as young as 13); the standard sample size forces the use of more skeletal models; and the opening of the Eastern bloc countries (where women are naturally quite delicately slender) caused an influx of lanky lovelies to grace the pages of our magazines and thus it's really quite normal that the curves here are deemed as more risqué. We have been fed a steady diet of rail thin, white, tall, Youth for the most part. Thus instead of delving further into what Beauty means to us as individuals, the tendency is not to question authority.

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Should one go out on a limb and include a genuinely voluptuous model, 9 times out of 10 they will do so by harkening back to the Renaissance. Rubens and the like, are seemingly our only reference point for a larger body […] If we continually marry the fat body with nude classics, then we are hardly creating a revolution.